


The Source

by bionically



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Coming of Age, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Grooming, Rey knows things and doesn't know why, kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 20:37:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21185639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bionically/pseuds/bionically
Summary: All her life, Rey has known how to do things without ever being taught. Why? She doesn't even really understand it.Until she does.An explanation of Rey's mysterious education.





	The Source

For as long as Rey could remember, there had been a burning presence in the back of her mind. 

She used to think it was her conscience. Or a guardian angel.

As a ragamuffin sneaking in and out of tight spots of abandoned ships, she had wondered what it would be like to be able to fly one of those things. To be able to sit in the cockpit and be completely free to just take off. Jump to hyperspace. Leave.

But the other scavengers talked and Rey, by dint of careful observation, knew that it wasn't that easy. Not more than a handful of people on Jakku knew how to fly. And the ones that did kept a low profile.

She was nine when it suddenly came to her out of the blue.

Rey was scrounging about in the cockpit of a downed fighter jet in the junkyards when something clicked in her mind.

_ This _turned on the electrical power of the fuel system.

_Activate_ _the jet engine._

_ Engines work left to right. _

_ When the engine light turns green, connect the fuel with this switch. _

Rey blinked as she sought to follow all the instructions in her head.

_ Where _ was all this knowledge coming from? Had she absorbed it somehow from the other scavengers around Plutt?

Rey's eyes were bright with the possibilities as her fingers deftly swept across the control panel. Once it had been a complete mystery to her, despite the hours she had spent scrutinizing it. 

Now, suddenly, she saw what was wrong with the ship.

The battery for this older A-X02 was no longer manufactured, and what had been there was long gone. The fuel pumps--the only one that remained was badly damaged, and the connector lines would have to be replaced. And those were only the initial issues for this piece of junk.

Rey subsided back in the seat that was much too large for her nine year old self and gazed out across the desert through the canopy pane that no longer existed. Something bubbled inside her. Perhaps she would be able to figure out other ships as well. 

* * *

The first time Rey was forced to defend herself in a fight was when she was twelve. She had forgotten one of the smaller items she had scavenged back at the cleaning station. When she returned for it, some other humanoid had ahold of it and grinned at her, baring jagged teeth. 

Rey would have turned and left, except she had spent _ hours _ working on the wafer. It had been a tough and miraculous find. She had to pry apart several rusted siding to get at it. Parts of the board had been rusty, but the gold strips of circuitry ran true. She could sell it as is, or strip it for its metals. Either way, it was a great find. 

She wasn't giving it up. Full stop.

_ Pick up the awning pole to your left. _

Rey started, and then immediately obeyed the voice.

_ He has a weapon. _

The voice was there again. A distant part of Rey absently noted that it wasn't so much a voice as a feeling. Some intrinsic knowledge bleeding into the edges of her subconscious. 

_ Feet apart. _

_ Protect your left flank. _

_ Elbows up to block. _

_ Two-armed grip, shoulder-width apart too compensate for your smaller strength and weaker build. _

And then a strange thought.

_ Don't hit below the waist. Jedis don't strike below the waist _.

The incongruity of that thought--and what on Jakar was a Jedi?--had her striking true. Right between the thief's legs. His eyes crossed and Rey nimbly leaped forward to grab the wafer from his pocket before dancing away.

* * *

Rey was fourteen when she suddenly pulsed with wetness between her legs. 

Her monthly had come to her last year and at first, she thought that was what it was. She had cried with dismay when she first saw the blood pooling in the seat of her pants, not understanding what she saw and not a little frightened at the sight of the bright red color.

_ Menses. Every woman goes through it. _

There hadn't been much more information than that then, but she'd taken comfort in how calm the voice had been.

Now, she rushed to an area of relative privacy and lifted up her tunic to survey herself. 

Nothing. No blood. Just a strange, pulsing--_ itch _. The kind that had her breathing strangely. 

There were only a handful of humans on Jakar. So few that she knew all of them by sight or name. Supposedly, there was a planet that humans like her had once inhabited. Once upon a time, humans had ruled such a place, multiplied so rapidly that they had sought out other planets for habitation.

_ She _ was made for multiplying. 

Rey had never given the matter much thought. Most of her energy had been spent on getting enough food to survive, waiting for family to come back to find her. _ Wait for us _, they had said and she had.

But that had been years before.

Nobody had been around to teach her the facts of life, to tell her what she was and how she came to be. She was a _ woman _ and she was made to have children. The way it happened was when a _ man _ put his seed in her _ there _. It could feel good. It could feel really, really good.

There were many other humanoid species on Jakar and how they interacted with one another was at times obvious and unlovely. There were those who could inseminate themselves, those who died after inseminating others, those who killed after being inseminated. Rey had never known where on the hierarchy she stood, only that it was an undesirable thing, not the least because she was barely able to sustain her own existence.

Now, procreation seemed only a small section of a much larger picture that she had never seen before. Human. She was made for another human somewhere. They could mate and it would not always be for procreation; sometimes it would be for pleasure as well. The sex organ of her partner would go in _ there _ where she had a hidden crevice—one she had never before realized even existed.

That night, Rey touched herself down there to try to find that orifice. Was it really there? That unknown source had told her so and it had never been wrong. 

She examined her small patch of coarse dark hair, but further downward she could not see and could only proceed by touch. There _ was _ something there, something soft and moist. 

For a moment, Rey thought she might have urinated on herself, but the sensation was a bit different. The texture was slippery rather than astringent. There was a part of her body that was accessible to her that she had never realized. How strange was this knowledge and how miraculous that the _ source _ would teach her, just as it had taught her of planes and fighting. 

Fingers curled against herself in a way that wasn't sexual but rather exploratory, she hugged the _ source _ to herself. She wasn't alone. 

She was here by herself in this barren desert of a planet, surrounded by few compatriots and even fewer friends, but she was not alone. 

* * *

After a while, Rey stopped being surprised at the things that popped into her head. For example, the very first time a large and extremely hairy beast of a humanoid landed on Jakar and had words with Plutt. Rey found that she could understand his language. To everyone else, it had been incomprehensible grunts, but to her, it was words with expression and meaning.

She could even understand droids, with their beeps and whirling, though she learned that this knowledge wasn't something people were born with.

The flow of knowledge had tapered off and gone silent in recent years, but the teachings had remained with her, a strange and inexplicable one-way exchange that was mystifying but also comforting. It was her parents, she decided. Who else would care so much for her?

After all, everyone knew that linguistics was of no use if not frequently utilized—it shriveled up. First you forgot little phrases and meanings, then your tongue started to have a difficult time forming the words until one day you woke up and it was difficult to even fully comprehend that language.

The fact that Rey didn't have that problem made her an oddity.

She supposed that was the reason she was drawn to Finn in the first place. He was reassuringly human and was from the Resistance. Something inside her gave a chirp of happiness at that. It was familiar in a way that went beyond the storybook tales she had been told. The Resistance were heroes. 

It had been so long since the _ source _ had told her anything, as though everything it knew had already been taught to her. That voice had remained silent for a very long time now. Sometimes she wondered if what had happened had all been in her head. That happened also, out here in the barren and endless dunes of this sandy planet. Mirages were a way of life; you could be fooled into believing anything was possible, only to see your possible doom staring you in the eye.

Eventually, when the voice kept silent for one entire year, then two, then three, and then four, Rey started to think that she had imagined it all. This place was not for the romantic and idealistic of heart. There were things she needed to do to survive just living from day to day.

Then her life took a very dramatic turn, starting with the arrival of a round white and orange droid.

* * *

Part of Rey believed, with a sort of cosmic superstition, that the _ source _ was the reason behind her turn of luck. And she did call it luck. Suddenly she was no longer just waiting and waiting, no longer lonely and hungry, but surrounded by friends from the Resistance and flying in hyperspace and having adventures that made her catch her breath afterwards. Going to planets so filled with green that she thought her eyes would burst from the images.

Suddenly, the _ source _ was back again, feeding her image after image of scenes that belonged to her yet not pertaining to her. Dark figures surrounding her with menace, swords that lit up the black night, being chased and tossed about—what was real and what wasn't? She wanted to block her mind from the sudden onslaught of knowledge, this time knowledge she didn't want or need.

She ran off into the forest. But no, the_ source _ found her. It wasn't benign, after all. It wasn't even familiar. It wasn't kind or friendly and then it took startling corporal form.

It was a figure from her nightmares. A masked figure that cut down figures without even approaching them. A tall faceless individual in all black who could control her every action despite her frantic struggling. He had her; he could surely kill her.

Who was this masked humanoid who killed so easily? He was the stuff of nightmares; he wasn't her secret protector, after all, but some strange predator who had lured her in only to kill everyone she had grown to love.

"It _ is _ you," he said, no longer maskless. 

Rey didn't understand. In this cold planet that was falling apart around her, with her two new friends dead or dying, her heart was filled with hatred and the willingness to _ kill _.

"You need a teacher," he said, unblinking eyes blazing with intensity.

Suddenly, Rey understood everything. It had been him all along. He was her secret teacher. Perhaps he didn't even understand it himself. But everything she learned and absorbed, it was because it had been a part of him he had thrown away on his road to darkness. On his headlong path away from his humanity.

He had thrown away the love for his family. His command of aircraft that his father had taught him. The languages he had learned from his mother and father. His physical training with his uncle. Along the way, he had even sacrificed the most basic part of himself—his innermost sexual need. 

All of it had passed through the cosmos to Rey. 

She was who he created by accident, by default.

"You belong with me," he said. _ I made you, I created you, I own you. Stand beside me now and rule with me. _

Just as Snoke had once said to him.

She _ was _ him, once upon a time. All the darkness inside him now was a progression from where she stood now.

It was why she could not kill him. All of her was the very light of him, sealed away across the universe, planted in the barrenness of a deserted planet, nurtured by the very absence of attention. 

She was no longer a child now. She was a full-fledged adult in her own right. 

When he looked at her with dark, pleading eyes, for the first time in her life, Rey closed her mind to the source who had been with her for so long. Shut the doors to the benevolent teacher who had once helped her through so much. 

She didn't regret the learning, but she wasn't beholden to him because of it. He had offered it free of visible strings; she had taken it. Now it came down to the wire—he wanted her in a different way now, standing with him as the disciple he helped raise in order to destroy everything he once was.

She refused.

Incidentally, she didn't need him anymore either.

The battle had only just begun.

**Author's Note:**

> Found this on my drive and cleaned it up a little.


End file.
